


Singapore

by crystalkei



Category: The Avengers
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-14
Updated: 2012-06-14
Packaged: 2017-11-07 18:09:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,698
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/433911
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crystalkei/pseuds/crystalkei
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Beach fic that ends in a rambunctious retelling of a mission gone bad in Singapore.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Singapore

“I expected to see a little more skin from you, Natasha.” Tony waggled his eyebrows at her, ducking as she hurled a towel at him.

 

“Nat is terrified of the sun,” Clint said as he and Steve tossed a Frisbee back and forth across the sand.

 

She stood glaring in her retro red, halter one piece. “I have a healthy understanding of what the sun can do to your skin, including give you skin cancer. I noticed you put the equivalent of olive oil on yourself, Tony, so I expect you’ll need Pepper to fetch you some aloe vera goop and aspirin after today. “

 

Spraying sunscreen across her arms, she turned to Bruce in his hat and shirt and the way he sat under the umbrella. Natasha nodded her approval towards him as if to say _finally someone with some sense._ She settled into a chair next to him under the shade stretching out her legs and wiggling her toes before opening her paperback.

 

“Why do you bother coming to the beach if you are just going to sit there?” Tony asked getting up, presumably to head towards the water but he stopped suddenly and squinted at Natasha’s feet. “Wait.”

 

Natasha looked back up at him and instantly pulled her legs up with her feet flat against the sand. “Hold on there, Agent Romanoff, hold on,” Tony said with a smirk that lit up his whole face with mischief. “What was that on your foot?”

 

“Nothing,” Natasha said a little too quickly and a little unsteady. Bruce looked up from his tablet at the sound of a nervous assassin, (it wasn’t something one saw every day.) He glanced at Tony and saw the look of pure joy and tilted his head in curiosity.

 

“I saw that.” Tony pointed at her feet that now were curled under her. She raised an eyebrow trying to throw him off, but the way she was protecting her feet was giving her away. “Cap, Barton, come here a sec,” he called over his shoulder while Natasha rolled her eyes. “I saw it and it would be worth the kick in my balls I’m surely to receive if I grab your left foot to examine it closer.”

 

The red head narrowed her eyes at Tony and bit the inside of her cheek before Clint betrayed her. “Don’t think we’re getting out of this one, Nat,” he said with a chuckle before lifting his own foot with a hand to reveal a small black tattoo in the simple shape of a spider directly underneath his middle toe, but above the sole of his foot. Now she shifted her glares to Clint and huffed a moment before she adjusted her position on the beach chair to lift her right foot into the air, it stopped right before it made contact with Tony’s nose. He flinched but then grabbed her foot with both hands and crowed loudly. In the same spot, below her middle toe, a no frills black tattoo of a rudimentary bird.

 

“This is the best thing to happen to me all day!” Tony cried while everyone else looked at him unfazed. “Can’t ‘none of your business’ your way out of this one, my super assassin friends!”

 

“I could actually kick you in the face and knock you unconscious,” Natasha suggested still frowning at him. Steve and Bruce both looked exasperated, tired of Tony’s antics and prodding about the relationship of the other two people. But Steve caught a glance between the pair, they were doing that not talking but still communicating thing that always impressed him and made him a little sad. He wondered what it was like to have someone like that.

 

“There was a mission gone bad,” Natasha said surprising everyone but Clint. “In Singapore. We got very drunk, got tattoos to solidify our _partnership._ ” The way she said it indicating it was nothing more than a professional partnership and no one should question it. “And that is the story. All done. The end.”

 

Tony smiled again, but he wasn’t satisfied. “You got matching tattoos. I’ve never seen either of you so drunk you’d do something irresponsible. I know, I’ve tried to get this guy,” he motioned back to Hawkeye, “hammered enough to tell me what was going on with you two and you’ve never once been too intoxicated to make stupid decisions. Again, I know, because I always try. You people are the least fun people in the world to drink with.”

 

Clint shrugged smugly and Natasha seemed to shake her head at him, but then shrugged back.

 

“It was really bad,” Clint started while Natasha pulled her foot from Tony’s grasp and tucked it back under her, going back to her paperback seeming to ignore the conversation. “Fury yelled at us for an hour and refused to extract us for another day, he told us we had a mess to clean up.”

 

Steve sat down on the sand and Tony plopped back into his chair after grabbing a beer from the cooler, they looked like children at story time. “So we tied up the loose ends, apologized to the ambassador’s house keeper, both in person and sent flowers, and then bought way too much liquor in the hotel shop. Back then,” he paused and turned to see Natasha engrossed in her book, but he knew she was listening to his every word, if he told it wrong or revealed more than she liked, she might shoot him, politely.

 

“Back then, Tasha only drank vodka, so we couldn’t get as much as we needed,” he paused and looked at Tony. “You’re not wrong, Stark, we do have a high tolerance and we had to go out for more.”  Tony nodded arrogantly and waved his hand giving a mock bow from his chair. “So there’s a place in Singapore, it’s called Four Floors of Whores.” Steve sucked in air and Tony let out a belly laugh.

 

“I already love this story,” he said with a clap. Steve was still shocked and Bruce smiled just a little. Natasha didn’t lift her eyes from the page, but she might have lifted a corner of her mouth, almost a smile.

 

“We were walking by, looking for a liquor store that was still open at the ungodly hour we were out,” Clint said becoming animated and smiling jovially at the memory. “We’re pretty buzzed at this point, but this girl grabs my arm, I tried to shake her off, not at all worried about it, but Natasha might have been a little defensive, that happens sometimes when she’s been drinking.” He glanced at her as she huffed quietly. He’d said too much but he couldn’t go back now.

 

“Two bottles of vodka we’d had between us, and she lands the girl flat on her back before I even noticed she’d left my other side.” Now Tony really started to laugh, Steve smiled, and even Bruce was trying to stifle a laugh.

 

“I’m thinking, _shit, we need to get out of here_ , but before we can go, an old lady comes out, thankfully speaking English instead of Merlion,” Clint continued, trying himself not to laugh.

 

“Merlion, really?” Natasha asked unimpressed by Clint’s attempt at a joke. He shook his head and it was Tony’s turn to roll his eyes at her.

 

“Let the man finish the tale of grand debauchery, I hope it ends with sex, it ends with sex, right?” he asked eagerly. Natasha sighed and Clint shook his head but still smiled.

 

“So she’s yelling that they have a you break it you bought it policy, and we have to spend some money in the establishment or she’s going to call the cops.” Steve looks horrified at the comment, probably trying to figure out if they truly broke the poor prostitute. “And who wants to be arrested in Singapore, right?” Bruce and Tony laugh while Steve looks confused again. Clint makes a note to fill him in on the nineties with some kind of VH1 highlight reel.

 

“Now, we could have run, but we were fuzzy enough that it would have been messy again, and we’d already been bitched out once that day by Fury, so we decided to go along with the angry lady and go inside. There’s a bar and they had vodka. We drank until we could barely see, but that didn’t seem to cover our balance.”

 

“You know what would have covered that balance, a couple of girls, or maybe a boy, for the fine Agent,” Tony said with a wink in her direction, she still wasn’t looking at him.

 

“Sorry to disappoint, but the story really doesn’t end in sex,” Clint said. “Really.”

 

“But we’re in the middle of the story, there’s no sex in the middle of it either? You’re in a place that sailors dream about!”

Steve grimaced but Clint pressed on, ignoring Tony’s comments. “Too drunk to drink more, not going to get girls, but there’s a tattoo guy on the third floor. It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

 

“And that’s the end of the story,” Natasha said, finally looking up. Clint stopped nodding his head in agreement. “We got a couple of tattoos in a place where no one was supposed to see them-”

 

“In one of the most painful places you could get a tattoo, because that’s how she rolls, _‘give it to me where it will hurt the most!’”_ Clint cut her off.

 

“Because she likes the pain, I get it,” Tony said lifting his eyebrows.

 

“I can kill you 37 different ways just from my chair, Tony, shut the fuck up or go back to Stark Tower in a body bag,” she threatened.

 

“And then you had sex?” he tried again, giddy.

 

“No,” both Natasha and Clint answered simultaneously.

 

Tony scrunched up his nose in disapproval. “This story would be so much better if it involved sex.”

 

Clint turned to Natasha. Both of them thinking of why the mission had gone badly in the first place, the story had actually begun with sex but Tony, Steve, Bruce, not even Fury was going to know about that part of the story.

 

 

 

 


End file.
